When did things happen? I like this question, and I like dates…and both are great for making a timeline.

See, lately I’ve been reading a good book called Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock.

It came out in 1995 and really puts some ideas out there for how long humans have really been around. It does more than that, however – it also gives us great dates.

I’ve been keeping track of those dates on a sheet of paper, and 150 pages into the book, I have some good stuff. Supplementing it with some information from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and my own history book on Ancient China, and this is what I’ve come up with:

I’m not quite done with this, as you can tell, and you can also probably tell where I’m going.

What do we make of these huge lapses of time? How come we have proof that man was walking in Asia 1.7 million years ago…but some still claim we didn’t leave Africa until just 100,000 years ago…a difference of 1.6 million years?

What happened during those 1.6 million years? I think what happened was flourishing levels of human culture and civilization, which may have been wiped out before…either through natural means or from their own hand.

Wow, what an idea, huh? But really, how do you explain writing at Tiahuanaco 8,000 years before humans learned how to write? How about advanced mathematics hundreds of years before writing came around? When you start looking at things like that, you really have to ask questions. I hope you’re asking them, and you can do that by reading interesting books. But the most interesting thing, to me at least, are the gaps:

There’s 6.5 billion years from our galaxy to our sun.

We’ve got 900 million years between some supercontinents.

Another 62.5 million years between dinosaurs and people.

There’s 1.7 million years from when people walk to when they leave Africa.

There’s 3.4 million years between people walking and theaccepteddate for leaving Africa.

Folks, people in the past weren’t stupid. We often like to think people just 100 years ago were dumber than us, but it’s likely the other way around. What if people were around a lot earlier than we thought, and what if they were a lot more advanced than we thought? That’d be pretty revolutionary, huh? Thanks for reading.